What's the difference between RSS and Atom? Both are XML formats, both are in common use, and most people who read RSS feeds don't need to know the technical differences between them. Atom was designed to resolve the incompatibilities among the various versions of RSS (0.92, 1.0, and 2.0) and is a bit more complex. It is also an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specification, RFC4287. RSS 2.0's specification is less formally reviewed and approved, but is still a standard.

If you're curious about how they're structured, here's a page for you: Comparison of RSS 2.0 and Atom. The top of this page shows a schematic of each data format -- showing each element and its children -- and a sample file. This page goes on to a more technical discussion about generating each of these formats with JavaScript, but the schematics are handy and helpful.

An article in last month's U.S. News and World Report ("Twitter Goes to College") talked about how some college faculty and students were using Twitter in their classes send tweets during lectures -- students could ask questions, post "huh?", etc., -- as a way of getting instant feedback on the class in process. Such "backchannel" behavior is common at library and technology conferences, but appears to be rising in academic settings.

This could provide another 'in' to the academic process for librarians -- being able to monitor a lecture in process and jump in with tweets of resources that might help the students understand the context of what is being discussed. A single librarian monitoring several classes at once could provide 'on the spot' reference services without needing to be in the classroom or interrupting the flow of the lecture.

Are any librarians or libraries providing, or considering offering, such a service to faculty and students?

I stumbled across yet another RSS embedding tool, the prosaically named JavaScript RSS Box Viewer. (See the "related posts" section below for my descriptions of several other similar tools.) RSS Box Viewer gives you a great deal of control over the output of your feeds (you can set the number of items to show, the width of the box, compact/expanded view, colors for the frame around the box, etc., etc.). Here, in fact, is a simple sample of the RSS4Lib feed that shows the most recent 3 headlines:

A few minor quibbles... The color palettes are "web safe", which means you can't match exactly the color scheme on the site. The web page where you configure your box doesn't handle wide formats for the box very well -- so if you want to preview your RSS feed wider than about 200 pixels, the preview overlaps the form you fill out (at least, for the Mac versions of Safari and Firefox). And the form requires you to enter an RSS feed's URL, not the URL of the site -- there's no autodiscovery.

But in terms of ease of use, this seems as powerful as the hosted version of Feed2JS and as flexible as Google's similar tool.

Related Posts

• Google AJAX Feed API
• It's Not Stealing -- It's Syndicating

I jumped on the Facebook bandwagon as it was pulling out of town and created a Facebook page for RSS4Lib (become a fan!). In the process, as I was adding the RSS feed for this blog using the Notes tool, I noticed something more than a little annoying: RSS feeds added to a Facebook page using Facebook's Notes application are rewritten to drive all traffic from that version of the feed to Facebook, not your own site. While clearly in Facebook's financial interest to bring more traffic to Facebook, they do so without explicit permission.

When you set up an RSS feed into Facebook notes, you are asked to agree to a brief terms and conditions that says, in its entirety, "By entering a URL, you represent that you have the right to permit us to reproduce this content on the Facebook site and that the content is not obscene or illegal."

However, Facebook's concept of "reproduce on the Facebook site" and mine are somewhat different. While I fully understood that my blog posts would be presented inside Facebook -- as they are on the RSS4Lib Notes page, I am surprised that the associated RSS feed includes rewritten channel and item data. As an example, take a look at the feed's channel data:

  <channel>
    <title>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS's Facebook Notes</title>
    <link>http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=81126379633</link>
    <description>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS's Facebook Notes</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <category domain="Facebook">NotesFeed</category>
    <generator>Facebook Syndication</generator><docs>http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification</docs>
    <managingEditor>http://www.facebook.com/pages/RSS4Lib-Innovative-Ways-Libraries-Use-RSS/81126379633</managingEditor>
    <webMaster>webmaster@facebook.com</webMaster>
    ...
  </channel>

The feed's link goes to Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=81126379633). That page provides reproductions of recent posts. Clicking on a post title, within Facebook, brings up that page in another Facebook page. There is a tiny link at the bottom of the page to "View original post".

The individual items in the RSS feed are likewise rewritten:

    <item>
      <guid>http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/feedmil_finds_feeds.html</guid>
      <title>Feedmil Finds Feeds</title>
      <link>http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=82829822943</link>
      <description>Full Text of Post Goes Here</description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2009 16:39:36 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS</author>
      <dc:creator>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS</dc:creator>
      <source url="http://www.rss4lib.com/index.xml">http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/feedmil_finds_feeds.html</source>
    </item>

They rewrite the link. They change the author from what it is in the original post, "rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum)", assign a creator that is not the author cited in the original post, and link to an RSS feed as the source. (Facebook does display the URL of the post, but clicking it goes to the feed. Depending on your web browser, it may not be helpful behavior to get an XML file.) They don't provide attribution for individual posts on the site.

The way Facebook is using my content does not fit my understanding of the Creative Commons "Attribution Non Commercial License" I have applied. Among other things, it states that:

1. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)


2. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

I'm willing to give on point 2 -- yes, I understand that by reproducing my blog on Facebook's site that I'm contributing to their commercial gain -- but on point 1, I did not waive my right to appropriate attribution as specified in the license on the blog by agreeing to "reproduce" the blog on their site. If this is "remixing," allowed in the Attribution Non Commercial license, requires that the licensee "takes reasonable steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to the original Work." This has not been done.

This sort of misuse of content happens all the time, of course, but rarely so blatantly.

Related Posts

• RSS Feeds & Copyright (May 2008)
• Creative Commons and Bloggers (August 2008)
• Copyright, RSS, and Common Sense (September 2007)

A new feed-finding search engine, Feedmil, has made an appearance. Feedmil is a feed-only search engine with some clever interface features to help you narrow down your search.

Feedmil's Google-inspired front page asks, "what are you into?" and provides a sliding control so that you can adjust the results from "surprising" to "well known" -- at either end. Want only well known feeds? Move the left end of the slider to the right. As soon as you let go of the slider, your search starts -- keeping you from adjusting both ends. I found it a bit surprising that the search started as soon as I moved a slider.

Feedmil gives you many ways to limit or refocus your search once it's presented the initial results. Here are the results of a search for "rss library" (I was hoping to pull up my own blog, which did, though not in the first place that I crave...):

There are several filtering options running across the top: Feed type (starts at 'all feeds', but also lets you narrow searches down to blog feeds, microblog feeds, podcasts, public media feeds, and social media feeds); sort options (Feedmil rank, quality, and relevance), and language.

On the right, there's a "topic significance" section that lets you select how much weight each of the topics (as determined by Feedmil) should have. Playing with these sliders reorders the search results; as with the front page, as soon as you let go of a slider, the display changes. If you want to restrict results to only one extreme or the other, simply move the slider all the way over.

Disturbingly, the results are displayed differently even if you don't move the slider at all. For example, here's the above search before and after clicking (but not moving) the "library catalog" slider:

I need to spend some more time using this tool, but I'm favorably impressed with my first look (aside from the odd interface issues noted above).